I could go moose hunting in this outfit!

Ever have one of those days where you put on an outfit, leave the house, and think you've done a decent job dressing yourself... but then you get to work, visit the bathroom, see yourself in the mirror and say, "Oooh...this dressing in the dark thing is clearly not working out for me."

(But it's saving me pennies in energy savings per year! Pennies! With which I can buy some Fannie Mae stock or maybe even that house down the street!)

Well I'm having one of those days.

The not-so runway-worthy outfit I chose this morning is a new dark brown sweater, paired with lighter brown corduroy pants (I didn't want to wear jeans today and with the crisp new weather, the cords calling out to me) and some dark brown high-heeled tall boots. But I can see now that the brown sweater and the pants are in completely different parts of the Brown Color Spectrum and it ain't pretty.

In trying to put into words why I had thought this was a good idea (I remember now that I'd read about coordinating shades of the same color when decorating rooms in your house - oops), I came upon this article from The Cornell Daily Sun:

Sometimes wearing the same color twice in an outfit can look chic, but it is very hard to pull off. Many people just assume that wearing many shades of the same color will make a unified outfit. However, they are mistaken. Often, wearing shades of the same color will clash more than match. Wearing varying shades of green doesn’t make an outfit, it makes a life-size booger.

Imagine the quintessential little girl decked out in pink, from a tutu to her mother’s old lip stick. The all-pink ensemble is adorable, considering that the outfit was constructed by a playful five-year-old. However, such an outfit is no longer adorable when the child has moved on from wearing her mother’s old lip stick to purchasing her own.

Many women will try to coordinate their outfits in the same fashion as their five-year-old counterparts decked out in all the same colors. Sticking with natural tones, like olive green, beige and brown makes the woman look like she must be going on a safari.

That just about sums it up.

Need a visual? I look something like this:


And to make matters worse, my cords are not of the skinny-leg style (still VERY popular in Europe, by the way) and thus are starting to bunch up around the middle of my leg as they gradually slip out of the boots.

Humor me. Tell me a story about your own fashion Oh No You Didn't! moment...pretty please?